I recently participated in BYU’s web analytics competition. The competition is put on by Omniture each semester, and the purpose is to analyze a company's analytics data and then give the company suggestions on how it can use that data to achieve its goals. The company that we looked at for this semester was BackcountryOutlet.com. It’s a site where Backcountry.com sells its discounted merchandise—outdoor gear from previous seasons and other sales items.
So let me explain my strategy for the competition. Since BackcountryOutlet is an eCommerce site, I figured that its main business goal is to earn revenues. And since it’s also an outlet, it wants to get rid of old inventory (which is why it’s selling items at discount). My strategy was to look at suggestions dealing with conversion (getting the people that are already coming to the site to make purchases). I could have looked at other things such as reach (advertising to prospective visitors) or acquisition (getting people to the site), but I wanted to focus on conversion because I figured it was better to convert the people already coming to the site before trying to get more people there. So my high-level strategy was mostly looking at ways to improve the site to lead to higher conversion (my low-level strategy involved success events and KPI’s, but I won’t bore you with the details).
As a side note, I went into the competition with some experience in analytics, having used free tools like Google Analytics and StatCounter. But I had never used Omniture’s SiteCatalyst before. SiteCatalyst is very sophisticated. You can get lost in the tool if you don’t know what you’re looking for or how to look for it. So I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the analytics, but I didn’t know how to use the tool.
Well, it ended up that I got sick for a week during the competition and I didn’t get to put as much time into it as I wanted. I did come out of the competition with some good experience though. I did a lot of studying and research into analytics, and I familiarized myself with the SiteCatalyst tool. I’ll be much more prepared for the competition when it comes around next semester.
